Firstly boot off the live CD and once you have your live CD desktop open up a terminal window, we now need access to the system drive on the NAS box which we can acquire as follows:-

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm
$ sudo mdadm --assemble --scan
$ sudo mount /dev/md3 /mnt

Next we need to make sure we’re working on the NAS system drive for all our commands so let’s chroot into it:-

$ sudo chroot /mnt

To reset the root password we need to run:-

 # passwd

To enable SSH (which is already installed) on startup we need to run:-

# update-rc.d ssh defaults 16

Finally we cleanup and reboot the NAS server:-

# exit
$ sudo umount /mnt
$ sudo reboot

Don’t forget to remove/eject the CD when the Ubuntu live CD prompts you to.

Now once the NAS reboots into its native OS (which happens to be Debian) you’ll find you’ll be able to login to the box as root with all the power that comes with it.